THE letters and the messages will be waiting for him once he takes a breath and reflects on the managerial milestone he’s reached.
But the most welcome card of all for Steve Clarke?
The one that reads Get Out Of Jail Free.
Because make no mistake, he used it here big time.
How his Scotland weren’t 3-0 down inside an hour once again was baffling.
Where all the energy and spirit and talent in the ranks had evaporated to was anyone’s guess.
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What the fallout would have been had the decision to leave Billy Gilmour out on a night when we desperately needed to keep the ball is anyone’s guess.
The fans were turning. Our dreams of World Cup glory were disappearing over the horizon.
And yet, we did it.
Somehow, we turned around a nightmare scenario to send Hampden into paroxisms of delight and leave us on the verge of a play-off place at very least.
It was incredible, improbable, right from the moment Vangelis Pavlidis produced the miss of this of this or any other season seven minutes in until big Lyndon Dykes sealed the deal deep into stoppage time.
Was it more than we deserved?
Probably, on the overall performance.
Do we care?
Do we f***.
We’ve had more than our share of misery on this stage for way too long not to grab the good times when they come along – and in the end, these were the very best of times.
It was only our second home win in ten. It will go down as one of the most important in a long, long time.
Truth is, though, that until Ryan Christie smashed us level straight after the Greeks had finally taken one of their many chances, Clarke was staring down the barrel of the kind of night that kills legacies stone dead.
Because as it all took up again where it has left off back in March, with the emerging Greece side picking us apart, you were left wishing we had someone who could get us on the ball and bring a bit of calm to the chaos.
Then you thought: Wait a minute – we do.
The boy Gilmour.
Clarke had dropped him from opening game in our first Euros against Czech Republic. He’d left him out of our opening game in our second Euros against Germany and Munich. And now in another huge fixture, he’d left him out again.
I cannot get my head round why this is.
Here we have a midfield player who wants to be on the ball, who rarely loses the ball, a boy with his head on a swivel who is an integral part of the squad for Serie A champions Napoli.
Yet he didn’t get into our starting 11 on a night where the opposition were always going to have loads of the ball? When we knew we’d need to treat it like a precious jewel whenever they loaned it back to us?
For me, that was a risk as massive as it was unnecessary.
I’m not saying Gilmour would automatically have changed the course of this game. I’m also well aware that he started that night when Greece hammered us here back in March.
All I’m saying is that once he finally got his trackie off, everything began to change.
Without him, we’d been so terribly passive, the Greeks smothering the life out of what little attacking threat we showed, then pushing up on us in numbers when they had the ball.
Had they put THAT chance away on seven minutes?
Who knows where we’d be in the morning.
A rat-a-tat of passes down the right-hand side of our box, skipper Anastasios Bakasetas teased a lovely ball across the face of Angus Gunn’s goal and, from two yards out, Benfica frontman Pavlidis air-swiped at it with no one even close to making a challenge.
Wow. Had he really done that?
Thankfully, bafflingly, he had. It was an absolutely huge let off for Scotland – but what a huge warning as well as to what the Greeks could do to us.
It was a warning we failed to heed, Nine minutes after the break Christos Tzolis dropped the shoulder and teased markers on the edge of the box before finding Pavlidis on the penalty spot, the frontman having time for two touches that set up Giorgos Masouras for a shot that really should have tested Gunn rather than ripping over the bar.
Next thing, we were all over the shop yet again. But this time, Kostas Tzimikas finally put us behind.
Step forward the ever-smiling, occasionally weeping Christie, who turned one of the worst corner kicks of his life into one of his biggest-ever goals.
From there, we were a different team. We were on the front foot at last, winning our duels at last, getting the punters out of their seats at last.
When the impressive Lewis Ferguson smashed a loosed ball through a crowd scene and into the roof of the net, the place went bonkers. When the frame of Gunn flew to top one out of the postage stamp one minute into six week, a nation breathed a gigantic, collective sigh of relief.
When sub Dykes then cashed in on a keeper’s fumble to finish the job?
We were back in Oslo, creating another footballid miracle.
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That one took us closer than ever to Germany.
This one…well, it had TransAtlantic written all over it.
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